Introduction

When we looked at the ASRock Z77E-ITX recently and I was over at Newegg checking out the prices on that particular board, I noticed an ASRock option that dropped below the $100 mark. It wasn't $99.99 either, it was $94.99. Looking at the model number I quickly went to find out if it was sitting in our to-do pile of Z77 motherboards.

To our delight the ASRock Z77 Pro3 was sitting proudly in the pile and I instantly found myself intrigued. I wondered how a board that carried the latest Z77 chipset from Intel could perform when it sits at under $100. Well, that's exactly what we intend to find out today.

This really is one of my favorite points when it comes to ASRock motherboards. We see the company take a true top to bottom approach. You can see we've got budget conscious options like the board we're looking at today, Mini ITX options like the Z77E-ITX we looked at recently while we've also got people who are looking for a bit more in the form of the ASRock Z77 Extreme6 and ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional.

Today is all about the budget friendly Z77 Pro3, though, and the first thing we're going to do is take a look at the package before we move into the motherboard itself. Once we've done that we'll head into the BIOS before looking at some of the other motherboards that we'll be including in our graphs followed up with the overclocking potential. Then it's time to get into the performance side of things before we finally wrap everything up.

Package

Looking at the box you can see even the cheaper Z77 Pro3 carries with it the same 555 XFast technology we've seen on other ASRock Z77 options recently. You can see Virtu MVP is offered alongside ASRock exclusive technologies like ASRock OMG, Internet Flash and On/Off Play technology.

Moving inside the box it comes as little surprise there's not a whole lot going on due to the price of this product. We've got the normal manuals included along with some information on the 555 XFast technology and Lucid Virtu MVP. We've also got the typical driver CD, two SATA cables and rear I/O plate.

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